Everything to do with letters
Raw and moving is Catelan-Moroccan writer Najat el Hachmi's new novel, Monday We Will Be Loved. An impressive story about the meaning of true freedom, and the price you have to pay for it. 'Monday, Monday, Monday... Monday we will be different. Monday we will be loved.' Every week, young woman Naïma tries to...
Falun Ellie Koos, Arja Mari and Max Urai will receive a C.C.S. Cronestipendium this year. This is a grant from the municipality of Utrecht for promising Utrecht authors. They will each receive 3,000 euros to enable their next publication. "A number of submissions stood out immediately because of the surprising addition the authors make to current Dutch fiction: in narrative voice,...
On Sunday 24 September, Babs Gons will be installed as Poet Laureate in Utrecht. This is also the starting signal for a two-week tour of Gons through the Netherlands and Flanders, together with a thousand other poets. The poetry caravan '1000 Dichters' will travel by tour bus to a different city every day, to return to Utrecht on 7 October.....
In Zutphen, I attended Jeroen den Herder's congenial small-scale cello festival. There, two young Portuguese students gave a lecture/recital on their research project on the music of fado singer and composer José Zeca Afonso, an important voice in the 1974 Portuguese Revolution. At home, I looked up that music. It turned out to be the perfect background when reading "Friesland, my...
Salman Rushdie will give his first interview in the Netherlands on 30 September during the ILFU (International Literature Festival Utrecht) after the attempt on his life last year. Journalist Chris Keulemans and writer Abdelkader Benali will speak to Rushdie at TivoliVredenburg via a livestream connection about his new novel Victoria City and his extensive body of work. Rushdie last appeared live on stage in 2018
I had - in a previous house - a neighbour who gave a young tree in front of our apartment complex a bucket of water every day. He had a thing for trees, as he had brought back some Sequoia seeds from a trip to the US, back in the day. He had put these in the ground in various places. One near the house, and that one, because of possible...
Adriaan van Dis with an intensely coquettish Renate Dorrestein, who (rightly) got him on the ropes with a few well-aimed pussy remarks. This excerpt from 1991 opened Zomergasten 2023 #4, and it chopped. Nostalgia all around, and during those first minutes of Theo Maassen with animal and children's book author Bibi Dumon Tak, the bar was set high. Would Theo Maassen with this...
Theatre collective Thomas, Sacha and Jos creates performance about universal love After years of fruitful cooperation with master storyteller Toon Tellegen and several performances based on his work, theatre collective Thomas, Sacha and Jos will perform Two Little Old Ladies at this summer's Theatre Festival Boulevard. Tellegen's book consists of 43 love stories, each starring two little old ladies. Thomas, Sacha and Jos made a...
The opening weekend of the International Literature Festival Utrecht includes a performance by Maggie Nelson, the NK Poetry Slam, the Utrecht Book Market, the start of the 1000-Dichtersmarathon and the inauguration of Babs Gons as Poet Laureate. The following two weeks will see performances by Philippe Claudel, Jeanette Winterson, Amitav Gosh and David van Reybrouck, among others. Two weeks later,...
In addition to the traditional Filter Translation Prize for the most extraordinary translation of the year, a new, additional prize will be launched for the first time in 2023, and it will be for translated children's and young people's books - with a separate jury, a completely separate statute and with a prize money of €10,000. Both juries struggled during their search for the best translation to their own...
24 September to 7 October 2023: a two-week tour of 1000 poets and poetry readers along 13 cities in the Netherlands and Flanders, in the run-up to the 40th Night of Poetry. In the run-up to the 40th Night of Poetry, 1,000 poets will read poems in 13 different places in the Netherlands and Flanders. The poetry marathon '1000 Poets' will take place in...
Op 14 juni 2023 sluiten het Netwerk Scenarioschrijvers van de Auteursbond en de Dutch Directors Guild zich aan bij de wereldwijde actiedag Screenwriters Everywhere. Hiermee steunen we de 11.500 leden van de Writers Guild of America West en Writers Guild of America East, die sinds 2 mei staken. Er zijn acties gepland in meer dan 20 landen. Scenarioschrijvers in de…
I can't resist mentioning it, because I think they were doing it for a reason, the dancers in the musical Wuthering Heights making really visible big rounds with their arms one time: this was a half-second reference to Kate Bush's world-changing 'windmill swings' in the music video to her legendary 1978 pop song. A subtle nod as in my...
Christian cultural traditions, such as Catholicism, are in the doldrums. How do they get out? Whatever you call backgrounds in terms of gender, origin and beliefs, looking at them all positively helps, with compassion and humour; how beautiful and funny are all these different people and expressions! So I am now happy to write about two people who climbed the cultural ladder, and just...
This year's ILFU (International Literature Festival Utrecht) will take place from 24 September to 7 October, under the motto "What's the story?". The programme includes regular ingredients such as the Utrecht Book Market, the NK Poetry Slam, the YALFU (Young Adult Festival) and De Nacht van de Poëzie. At the heart of ILFU on 30 September will be the festival day 'Exploring...
On 7 October, the 40th edition of the Night of Poetry will take place as the conclusion of the ILFU Festival. In the Grote Zaal of TivoliVredenburg, Ester Naomi Perquin and Piet Piryns will present, as always, about twenty poets and a handful of 'entr'actes'. Among the first confirmed poets' names are two veterans who were already there at the first Night in 1980,...
'People who consider themselves traditionally on the left don't want to criticise woke because they are afraid they are aiding and abetting the right, and they certainly don't want that. And yet they feel that there is something wrong, something not really left-wing about woke discourse. That's what I'm trying to untangle....
Vertel! Storytellingfestival opent je blik naar de wereld om je heen. In samenwerking met Het Verhalenhuis en De Vertelacademie presenteert Theater Kikker op zaterdag 13 mei een unieke samensmelting van verhalen, muziek, culinaire hapjes, een inspirerende expositie en nog veel meer. Je luistert op deze dag naar de verhalen die onze stad rijk is. Kom naar Vertel! en maak kennis…
Some writers are at the forefront, others write their novels in the lee. Richard Osinga (51) belongs to the latter category. With each book, he gains in eloquence. Mint is the new shoot on the stem of his increasingly interesting oeuvre. At one point, Richard Osinga himself was a little too lazy. After his novel...
In his new, fifth novel, writer Stefan Popa (1989) returns to Romania, which previously served as the setting for his debut novel Vanished Borders. The novel's protagonist is a 'half-breed', just like the writer, but the other way round. While Popa, is a son of a Dutch mother and Romanian father, protagonist Alex Petrescu, on the contrary, has a Romanian mother and...
Writer and theatre-maker Nhung Dam (38) tried to be as Dutch as possible, but is increasingly embracing her Vietnamese roots. Because these are precisely what make her unique, she now realises, and offer a wealth of stories. Including for her second novel, Definition of Love. Two worlds Nhung Dam (38) more or less grew up in two worlds. Her cradle was in...
De winnaars van het Thérèse Cornips Stipendium 2023 zijn bekend. Zij ontvangen ieder een geldbedrag voor het verder verwezenlijken van hun plannen op literair gebied. Het beschikbare budget van € 12.500 wordt over vijf projecten verdeeld. Gehonoreerde aanvragen Toneelvertaler Mike Sens ontvangt € 1.750 voor de voltooiing van zijn vertaling van Visions nocturnes, een stuk van de Franstalige Belgische schrijver…
This year's Charlotte Köhler Prize, a triennial award for writers of prose, poetry or drama, has been awarded to Peer Wittenbols (1965). Wittenbols receives the €15,000 prize for his entire oeuvre and in particular for the youth-oriented play Trojan Wars (2020). The jury consisted of theatre scholar Sruti Bala, actor, writer and director Gable Roelofsen and...
In his new novel, Italian bestselling author Niccolò Ammaniti (56) wittily holds up a mirror to modern man. His protagonist, the wife of the Italian prime minister, is afraid of being blackmailed with a sex video. "I don't know if I would have the same courage as her in such a situation," he says. Storytelling fun With novels like I Pick You Up, I Take You and I...
The Zilveren Krulstaarten were awarded on Saturday afternoon 25 March in Amsterdam to the writers of the best film and television scripts of 2022. Once started as a giants' prize due to the lack of a Golden Calf for screenplay, the Zilveren Krulstaarten have now become the Dutch professional awards for screenwriters. The winners are chosen annually by members of the Authors' Association's Screenwriters Network....
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